The trouble with Truth PROMO

Trouble with Truth is the story of the power of print in the face of oppression. As the apartheid government clamped down on free political activity and speech, a cheeky, independent-minded weekly newspaper shouted its protests, against the odds in the racist South Africa of old. A newspaper that started as a communist weekly in the 1930's in Cape Town, developed into the intellectual voice of the liberation movement in South Africa, taking on the discriminatory ideology of apartheid and exposing its practices in print and photographs, headlines and provocative cartoons. The story is told through the nostalgic memories of people who worked on the newspaper during the oppression, many of whom left South Africa for exile but have subsequently returned. The atmosphere of the paper is captured in treated reconstructions and the filming of the last hot-type printing press left in the Southern Africa. The newspaper was run by a small committed staff on a shoestring, in shabby offices, and it gave a platform to the voices and debates of the liberation struggle. Irrepressible, defiant and brave, this small newspaper survived almost 40 years, changing its masthead regularly to dodge the censors, and punching way above its weight. The crackdown in the 1960's, after the Sharpeville Massacre, spelt its demise and it folded, after its journalists fled into exile, or worse. They were imprisoned or assassinated, and the newspaper was buried in the silence of oppression. But as a young American historian discovered, the archived newspapers remain a significant testimony to the fight for freedom of speech and the free media, in a country where nothing, not even democratic freedom, is certain.